The complexity of sustainability is breathtaking – how to make sense of the conflicting effects? 

Few people try to promote the progress of harmful things through their actions. When municipalities and companies choose what to do and what not to do, they act based on their best knowledge to advance things that they consider worth pursuing. However, it may happen that a good action, which has positive effects on a particular issue, leads to unexpected negative effects elsewhere. Such effects are called cross-effects. To manage the consequences of decisions, contradictions, and also synergies, must be identified and evaluated. 

Identifying cross-effects is not an easy or simple task. Therefore, the Ministry of the Environment’s Sustainable City Programme has tackled the topic in a project in which municipalities, together with Sweco and its sustainability consultants, developed their capacity to identify and assess the impacts of their sustainability actions. 

The deeper you dive into impact assessment, the wider the network of cross-effects and synergies spread. The phenomenon is familiar from sustainability work in general: sustainability issues are complex, and often ”everything is connected”. Especially in work that aims to consider environmental, social, and economic aspects of sustainability, it is easy to get out of breath. Where to start, and what to do when you can never finish the whole thing definitively? 

There are many ways to identify cross-effects

An excellent starting step in managing the impact of a sustainability measure is to define the measure under consideration: how extensive is the action we want to address? The measure to be evaluated must be concrete enough for the cross-effects assessment to be most successful. The project has dealt with, for example, influencing the development of a certain area, locating service units, and meadowing along the roadside. 

There are already many ways of identifying the impacts of sustainability measures, from internal work to stakeholder consultations, and the utilisation of national data. The more widely different identification methods can be used, the more likely it is to obtain a comprehensive picture of the potential impacts. This also highlights the importance of cross-administrative work: cross-sectoral effects extend to different administrative branches, and together they are more reliably identified. 

At best, the impacts can form clear chains and networks that can be used to illustrate the consequences of the action taken. 

Identifying material impacts takes the change to the source

Even in the case of cross-effects, it is ultimately essential to be material: what are the most significant, largest, or difficult impacts in relation to the action at hand that cannot be ignored in our municipality? They’re things to start with – and at the same time make sure you don’t cause significant harm with other impacts. 

Identifying the material impacts is important to influence the issues that can bring about real change. How, then, can this review be carried out? In our project, we have prepared and tested various tools to identify and prioritise impacts. 

Lessons learned and advice will be published in late autumn 2023

Once the most significant impacts have been selected, efforts must be made to concretise, verify, and measure the impacts. This requires an impact assessment, which the project will discuss for the rest of the year. In addition, the project participants will familiarise themselves with bringing information into decision-making together with municipalities – how to ensure that decision-makers have access to the necessary information on the essential impacts of the action before proceeding further. 

By systematically examining complex sustainability skeins from different perspectives and choosing what to tackle first and what to tackle later, you can get off to a good start. There are many questions to be solved and sustainability issues may seem like a mountain, but with persistent progress, the work begins to bear fruit. The significance of municipalities and cities in sustainability work is enormous, not least because Finnish municipalities have executive power over many everyday sustainability solutions. The project has noticed that good examples can already be found, and that sustainability measures can also promote many other things worth striving for, such as comfort and a sense of community. To support the work, a workbook will be published towards the end of the year, which will compile the lessons learned and concrete advice gathered during the project. 

The Sustainable Cities sub-project of the Ministry of the Environment assesses the cross-effects of measures taken by cities and municipalities from the perspectives of social, cultural, economic, and environmental sustainability. The municipalities involved in the project are Lappeenranta, Oulu, Porvoo, Rovaniemi and Vantaa. 

Matleena Moisio, Senior expert, matleena.moisio@sweco.fi
Ulla Värre, Senior expert, ulla.varre@sweco.fi
Joonas Söderholm, Senior expert, joonas.soderholm@sweco.fi